Filmmaker Mira Nair revealed the first look of her upcoming film Amri, inspired by the life of Amrita Sher Gil, a great painter. Mira Nair revealed the titular cast yesterday, which will be played by Anjali Sivaraman.
Mira and Clara Royer have written the film. Samudrika Arora, Michael Nozik and Mira Nair produce it. Anjali Sivaram is an actress and singer famous for her roles in (2022) as Anuja and as Suhani Ahuja in the Netflix series Class (2023). She also stars as Ramya in the 2025 Tamil film Bad Girl, directed by Varsha Bharath.
Cast
Apart from Anjali Sivaraman as Amri, several impactful people also signed on for the film, including Emily Watson as Amri's mother, Marie-Antoinette Gottesman, Jaideep Ahlawat as Amri's father, and Umrao Singh Sher-Gil. Krisztián Csákvári as Victor Egan (Amri's Husband), Anjana Vasan as Indira Sher-Gil, Jim Sarb as Karl Khandalavala, and Priyanka Chopra Jonas as Madame Azurie.
Life of Amrita Sher Gil
She was born in Budapest, Hungary, to a Sikh aristocrat father, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Majithia, and a Hungarian mother, Marie Antoinette Gottesmann. She spent parts of her childhood in both Hungary and India, giving her a multicultural upbringing. From a young age, she showed extraordinary talent in painting.
In 1934, she returned to India and became deeply inspired by Indian people, village life, and classical art traditions. She travelled across North and South India, studying Mughal miniatures and Ajanta cave murals. Her paintings began to portray rural women, labourers, and ordinary Indian life with emotional depth and rich colours.
She was known for her bold personality, intellectual interests, and bohemian lifestyle. She died unexpectedly in Lahore in 1941, at just 28, shortly before her first major solo show was to open. The exact cause of death remains debated.
Storyline of Amri
The story is set across Hungary, France, and India in the early twentieth century. This film will trace the events, locations, and incidents that shaped Amrita Sher-Gil's artistic vision and imagination.
Mira expressed her undying love for Amri, as she plays a major role in shaping Mira Nair's professional career. She said that, for her, Amri is deeply personal; from her life, she learns how to see something from a different point of view. She also claims that Amrita Sher-Gil's art has inspired all her films over the past decades.
Mira shares that the film will explore Amrita's coming-of-age as both an artist and a woman; it will portray her endless search for selfhood, her defiance of convention, even to the point of scandal in her love life, and her determination to create a visual language entirely her own.
The film's producer, Samudrika Arora, also notes that Amri's art reveals the aspirations of the modern generation, where identity and unapologetic self-expression meet. She fantasises that Amri belongs to two different worlds, but her tactful challenge to balance her life and art in both is flawless. She adds that Amri carried the best of each within her, and she didn't lose herself in the space between them, which moves Samudrika to produce this film.
Amri is expected to be rich in depicting the art and pursuit of womanhood, confronting life's difficulties, and highlighting the importance of perseverance in a woman's life.
